Three phases of Indian renaissance

by K. N. PANIKKAR

Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

The way to stem the increasingly declining values in society is to
rethink the relationship between culture and politics in a manner in
which culture is spurred by politics and politics is refined by culture.
It is time to think about a fourth phase of the Indian renaissance.

IN the historiography of modern India, the
renaissance is generally marked as the pre-political phase of the
anti-colonial struggle, a period when Indians were mainly engaged in
social and cultural preparation for participation in the more
“progressive” and “radical”, political programme. The social and
religious movements, popularly termed as the renaissance, which preceded
the political struggles, are considered a necessary precursor to the
coming of nationalism. Hence, nationalism is conceptualised as a natural
outcome of the renaissance.

This teleological view of history has been dominant till recently. A departure from this view, quite critical for renaissance studies, had to wait until a strict periodisation of historical time came to be questioned. Not only broad overarching labels like ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary periods, but also thematic periodisation like the colonial, reformist or nationalist periods came under scrutiny. The challenge to this neat compartmentalisation came from different sources. To begin with, from Marxist scholars who traced the social origins of the national movement, from Dalit scholars who came out with alternative histories based on caste, and subaltern historians whose focus was on domination and subordination. This not only marked a change in the universe of analysis, but also a reconceptualisation of categories and the re-examination of analytical categories such as caste, class, community, and so on. In the realm of the history of ideas, the intellectual history, if you like, the most important departure has been the contextualisation of ideas.

Modernity and Renaissance

The relationship between modernity and the
renaissance has given rise to a variety of questions. Whether the
renaissance succeeded in resolving the social contradictions that
existed in society is one important question. Why the renaissance did
not become trans-sectional and why it remained religion-caste oriented
is another. Is it that the renaissance was the expression of nothing
more than an aggregation of upper-caste social and religious interests?
Is it a fair assessment that the renaissance did not succeed in
transgressing the limits set by the Brahmanic ideologies? Is it
accidental that the university syllabuses did not contain courses on the
history of Dalits and the marginalised? Why did the historical
literature on the evolution of modern India treat the renaissance as an
overarching phenomenon striding across the Indian society in the 19th
and 20th centuries, without much sensitivity to the fortunes of the
marginalised? An inquiry into the relationship between renaissance and
modernity may provide answers to some of these questions.

The origin of modernity in India is often
attributed to the intellectual and cultural efflorescence associated
with the renaissance. The renaissance marked a period of transition in
values, transformation in social sensibilities and rebirth in cultural
creativity. The outcome of these processes was the elaboration,
representation and interpretation of humanism and the emergence of a new
man with cultural and intellectual attributes different from his past.
These ideas inspired an upsurge of creative energy, leading to the works
of masters in painting, sculpture, literature, music, and so on. The
new aesthetic that emerged was integral to the structural transformation
of social organisation and relations of production. It was the
intellectual component of the rise of capitalism, which came to be
christened as modern, to distinguish the present from the past—the new
from the old.

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